"They Win If They Take Our Freedoms"
f flee-market libertarianism is the nearest thing to an official church in SiliconValleg then T.J. Rodgers is its fire-andbrimstone minister in chief. Sharp of mind and tongue, the president and...
...What competitors keep you awake at night...
...How about overseasnJapan...
...It's the opposite of what SiliconValley's about...
...Do they A talk with T.J...
...So I don't see any hope for this Japanese economy until they make some fundamental changes...
...He forced the team to work very hard...
...I see the government creating an environment in which free people can live and prosper...
...Oracle Corp Chairman and CEO] Larry Ellison wants to sell databases, correct...
...When Admiral James Stockdale was in the Hanoi Hilton prison, and his life was miserable, he never once thought things wouldn't be much better in the future...
...Building on the basics, and then competing through strength and effort...
...we haven't had a few thousand years of hierarchy to grind out our faith...
...For instance...
...Some people blame the Fed's interest-rate policies...
...One of the things I don't think Bush gets is that the terrorists win if they take away our freedoms, directly or indirectly.And now they are being allowed to do that...
...therefore, they're ascendant and will continue to improve...
...Now we've entered a world where they're taking away your fingernail clippers at airports and we have the Federal government deciding how many bags you can take on an airplane.All kinds of stupid encroachments into our freedom.And we now have a director of the Office of Homeland Security who is a cabinet member...
...That's a concept that's been mistakenly with us since the Roosevelt era...
...I can't imagine what sort of motivation causes somebody to be a part of a machine that takes money and then doles the money back out, and gains favors in the process...
...It's not that expensive...
...On the political side, you see Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and talking about God punishing us...
...Give me back whatever money is left in the company and keep it...
...We're in the middle of the Stockdale Paradox in the Valley right now...
...On the other hand, the events of September 11 were extraordinary...
...I'm not a big government fan...
...And Big Brother can be efficient with Oracle software...
...If it's going to go down, it's going to go down...
...It's scary what's going on...
...Unfortunately we're seeing a lot of commercialization of September 11 th...
...The difference is that in the U.S...
...It's kind of shabby...
...I'm a much higher life form than just a football player: I'm a Green Bay Packer season ticket holder...
...Sharp of mind and tongue, the president and CEO of chip-maker Cypress Semiconductor is a vehement and dependable critic of government regulation, subsidies and corporate welfare, who says tech leaders should spend less time making deals with politicos and focus on what they do best: innovating and changing the world...
...Here we understand that if we don't like the future, we'll just invent a better one...
...The fight against terrorism is going to be broad and sustained...
...He's basically the head spook, who's got the right to quash your freedoms with multi-agency powers...
...For example, the government bailed out Chrysler years ago and I'm still mad about it...
...I travel to the Shrine eight times a year...
...I'm a Republican, but what I call a "reluctant Republican" because I feel Republicans are less damaging to freedom in this country than the Democrats...
...Europeans always marvel about how optimistic we are...
...So what the hell, we'll join up...
...I would hate to see a parade of CEOs going to Washington trying to find an angle to get money out of this...
...I used to have sort of a select small group that I liked, and thought was doing a good job...
...That one scares the hell out of me.That's a menace that will be after us for decades...
...So maybe now we can have everybody's fingerprints and retinal scans put into computers...
...It sounds like a phrase out of Orwell's 1984...
...Maybe the Fed can mitigate the slowdown, in the best case...
...That is, if you want to invest now, it's a good chance to get in at a low price...
...Better than ever...
...I'd rather go fishing...
...The "Office of Homeland Security" does sound a little over the top...
...Eighty percent of them were manned by people who expected to start a company in the garage, hack away for a few months and become multimillionaires.They were get-rich quick artists...
...But I would hate to see it turn into a multi-year welfare program, for anybody who conjures up a connection to the attacks...
...He stood for basic values...
...So what kind of person are you if you dedicate your life to lobbying the government for things...
...They say:"It's an organization that represents us in Washington...
...ROGERS: I'm reading a new book called Good To Great, whose authors [James C. Collins and Jim Collins] talk about a phenomenon called "The Stockdale Paradox...
...Your reaction...
...The keiretsus that run the country are smart, but they're not as smart as a free economy...
...That's the best offer I had in a year...
...Sure...
...with cup in hand...
...Is there anyone in government doing a good job...
...Siebel [Systems] has purchased the world's largest American flag and attached it to the side of their building, supposedly to symbolize growth...
...That's what I grew up with and what will get us through the hardest of times...
...Even these...
...He is a man of diverse passions, equally at home discussing his pinot noir vineyard as he is torpedoing the latest fads in industrial policy...
...What about TechNet, the tech industry's representative in Washington...
...The basic belief of all these groups is that government is good and big government is better...
...But obituaries for the "New Economy" are piled high ? I've been dumping on dot-com "miracles" for years...
...Let's switch gearsnthe venture capital market...
...What lesson can you take away from the football field...
...In a paper entitled "Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations With Washington, DC," (see the Cypress Web site), 1Kodgers argues that the calcified heart of national politics is "antithetical to the core values" of high technology...
...Of course, that might imply their company's growth...
...TAS: What's the mood in the Valley...
...that somehow the government controls the economy, and that government spending and interest rates controlled by the government are what make the world go up and down.That's B.S.The economy is the economy...
...The Democrats do it the other way around, and in general do more damage...
...Japan is a collectivist economy...
...It's scary as hell...
...The Bush administration has been bailing out industries hit hard by the aftermath 4 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR " NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OOI of September 11th, the airlines most prominently...
...But it will be short-lived...
...The cretins are coming out of the woodwork, trying to use this event for their own means...
...So I think there'll be tolerance for more government actions...
...Any lessons you could transfer to the boardroom...
...It has no relationship to capitalism whatsoever.The Japanese economic system confiscates wealth from its citizens by forcing them, through a lack of choice, to put their money in quarter percent interest Post Office accounts and then that money is doled out by the crony system to the good old boys who run the country...
...K NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OOi 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...Are we going to see fair-weather libertarians heading off to D.C...
...You're a PR man for beggars.What kind of life is that...
...You can't really believe in freedom n which is what libertarianism is aboutmand have an event that causes you to stop that belief...
...You played football at Dartmouth...
...Republicans tend to favor economic freedom and beat up individual freedom...
...Taiwanese are free-market capitalists and they operate in a sustainable way...
...VCs are bleeding...
...Meaning that they take less than they could, and that they prevent others from doing as much damage as could be done...
...But as I've watched over the years m even the supposed good-guy yearsmit turns out that "good" really means "not bad...
...Ronald Reagan was a member of that group...
...Look at Vince Lombardi...
...What is the proper relationship between government and business...
...I'm an anti-fan of government, but I think there are places where government matters...
...Do you fear any assault on civil liberties...
...Then these organizations then go to Washington and say to the politicians,"I have all these constituents who say big government is good, because they're members, and here's what we want from you...
...Period...
...Rodgers create in a positive way...
...Japan is moribund, and will continue to be moribund until the old order gets thrown out...
...Jim Daly talked with Thurman John Rodgers at Cypress's headquarters in San Jose...
...A lot of SiliconValley companies mindlessly sign up for organizations like TechNet or the American Electronics Association...
...TechNet and AEA basically perpetuate a big union, big government, big corporation model...
...Anything the free market can create or do in a society is the best way to create and do it...
...Freedom is not something that they're about...
...I don't like government intervention...
...In my case, I'm more willing to tolerate things that I would not have otherwise tolerated...
...During the campaign, I liked what Bush had to say about a small government that lets the economy run on its own...
...They just kept the freight train going in the same direction and they piled it up...
...In the 1980s, they did some fairly significant damage to the semiconductor industry, but when we in the free market reacted to it and changed the way we do business, they didn't...
...We're getting beaten up by events, but believe our future's never been brighter...
...There's always hallucinatory rhetoric about fine-tuning the economy...
...It's in tough shape, no...
...TechNet is a lobbying organization...
...In every society, there are people who would like to have more power.What Bush has done is allowed people to do things that they couldn't get away with during normal times.We haven't actively tried to make sure that people's freedom isn't taken away...
...They've overfunded investments and don't have money left to replenish.We got a call from aVC yesterday who said, "Why don't you take over my company...
...It's not clear, for example, that we want two or three airlines to go out of business...
...The scariest country we deal with is Taiwan...
...More likely, they'll aggravate it...
...It keeps an eye out if the government is doing bad things and gives us a warning...
...Having the capability of keeping the airlines going is something I accept as reasonable government intervention...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
